Consciousness Requires a Metaphysical Second Birth

Research into the enigma of consciousness has been proceeding with increasing intensity and momentum over the last 45 years.  However, the preponderance of this research has focused on the issue from an outside-in perspective, with little success.  In this article I advance an ‘inside-out’ explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness, predicated on the identification of a higher-order organ of perception as the causal agent that gives rise to consciousness (herein, ‘the matrix of Meaning’ or ‘MOM’).

Consciousness requires the presence of three elements: (1) a witnessing self, or subject, capable of apprehending ‘objects’ in the world; (2) objects that can be apprehended (‘named Others’); and (3) a feedback loop between (1) and (2), such that the subject’s interaction with those named Others can be expressed in terms of ‘what it’s like’ qualitative states or experiences.  Absent these three elements ‘all possibility of consciousness ceases’ according to Carl Jung, because consciousness ‘presupposes a differentiation into subject and object and a relation between them.’ (1)

Granting that these are the ingredients that combine to produce consciousness, we can then ask when, and by what mechanism, is this subject-object-relation cognitive architecture made manifest.  When in other words in the developmental timeline of an infant/ toddler does consciousness appear, and how is it implemented?  The fact that we don’t have any definitive answers to basic questions such as these that speak directly to the kind of creatures we human beings are, highlights the limitations of studying consciousness from an outside-in perspective. This kind of methodology renders correlations, not explanations.

An analysis of consciousness from the inside-out, reveals that MOM operates as a higher-order organ of perception located in the unconscious mind, to translate primary sensory data into a mental model of the world that projects into a four-dimensional experiential reality.  MOM constructs this model by weaving together the threads of the underlying sound-meaning system to form a unified field of Meaning.  In this unified field, the separation of subject and object appears to reflect an underlying existential reality, but in point of fact this is an illusion generated by the architectural design of the underlying substrate of Meaning.

Consciousness emerges from this transformational process, and is a product of the aforementioned tripartite cognitive architecture.  For the infant/ toddler learning his or her first language, this internally generated model acts as a metaphysical second birth. By separating out subject from object, it moves the child from a state of sentient participation to one of conscious awareness.  Prior to this point, he or she has no personal remembrances or self awareness to draw on, because memories attach only to embodied entities that have undergone a metaphysical second birth.

The reason we are blind to the existence of MOM, and to the source of consciousness, is a testament to the fact that the blueprint for our perception of reality is embedded within the architecture of Meaning and cannot be readily extricated from it. Meaning is the prism through which we ‘see’ the world.

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(1) Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Princeton University Press, 1951).